Category: Essays
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How Flash Died
Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats. – Adobe The go-to technology for web animation and rich interface programming will disappear entirely by 2020. Flash has died a thousand deaths but the first major blow, as I recall it, was this epic letter/rant from Steve Jobs…
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Insight
Idea Generation and Design Thinking Crafting great web destinations is not about technique. It’s not even about technology. You can have the best team, fast servers, and amazing VCs behind you. But those things, although important, don’t matter as much as the golden key: insight. Insight gives you an invitation to explore the customer’s mind. It lets you know what they want. Hence, you can engage in customer-driven development. It’s like a compass for your…
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Prototyping is About Capturing the Essence of a Project
What is essential to a web property? What can drive traffic, achieve conversions and translate into profits for the company? What can change people’s lives in a substantial way? These are the questions we should be asking ourselves when we talk about website prototyping. Version 1 prototypes should be embryonic, direct, and effective at capturing the user’s mindset. You have to make do with less, but you have to make it as effective as the…
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Bitcoin in 2017
Following an expected December rally, bitcoin surpassed the $1000 mark and flirted with reaching its all-time high. With a plethora of industry experts calling for a price to stabilize between 2 and $3,000 dollars, it is very hard to give differing predictions for movements in bitcoin. However, consider the following: 1. Bitcoin’s volatility problem will likely continue and we recently experienced it in a 20% price collapse: The value of digital currency bitcoin crashed on…
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Your Keyboard as a Bottleneck
It surprises me how many new developers fail to internalize their main development computer as an integrated system. They think that a computer is simply a collection of parts and routinely forget considerations about ergonomics when purchasing new hardware. Many of these recent grads are coding complex web applications using a laptop keyboard that is probably worth less than ten dollars; their use of portrait screens, secondary monitors, specialized track pads and voice recognition software…
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Web Assembly: A Tectonic Shift
Web Assembly is the next stop for bringing web sites closer to the speed and versatility of native apps. The new standard would provide an assembly layer of compiled code that can be executed as much as 20 times faster than JavaScript. Web Assembly is a W3C standard that will bring similar functionality as Java and .Net without the requiring any plugins. WebAssembly, or wasm for short, is intended to be a portable bytecode…
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Don’t Ignore the Social Challenges of Web Development
Our goal is to leverage what is already out in the field in terms of partners, but then hire in project management capability and a bit of technical capability. – Kevin Rollins It is easy to get excited about the new wave of technologies entering the market and the constant evolution of frameworks, hardware and technological ecosystems while at the same time forgetting about the single biggest bottleneck in web development: social challenges. Organizational structures,…
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Content Fragmentation Follows Device Introduction
If we map out the evolution of the Internet by device introduction we find very interesting dynamics. For one, every major device introduction has been preceded by a revolution in content production. We saw it with web browsers, mail list servers, iPhones, social networks, Bitcoin, the Internet of Things and now with wearables. Every new device category that is successful in the marketplace brings with it a fragmentation in the content production unit of your…
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End User Involvement is Critical for Web Development Success
Whether you are building social networks, web applications or simple websites, end-user involvement is critical for success. Wireframes, prototypes and MVPs mean little without strong user feedback. It pains me to review a number of products and services which were built with no end-user input whatsoever. Benefits of End User Involvement End-users can shed light into a myriad of issues that designers and developers constantly forget. Figuring out things like font sizes, layouts and content…